It uses more energies than entire countries, just like every industry that uses orders of magnitude more than bitcoin.
Energy =/= pollute
Focus on the bad actors that are polluting, occasionally you’ll find a miner
Energy =/= pollute
Focus on the bad actors that are polluting, occasionally you’ll find a miner
This is true of lots of industries, but even our most wasteful (raw aluminum processing?) or grossly extractive (gold mining?) industries produce actual materials of value.
That being said, I wouldn't rest on your "Bitcoin is free of slave labor" laurels so quickly[1].
The question is what’s the minimum to do something. Bitcoin uses more energy than the alternatives.
A wood burning stove is wasteful, a heat pump, not so much. Why? Because what’s important is the difference in energy between the action taken and the most efficient action to complete a task.
1. It's not the most efficient way and there's an alternative (e.g. Proof of Stake)
or
2. It may or may not be the most efficient way, but Bitcoin doesn't provide the value to justify the carbon emissions ('just tax carbon commensurate to its negative externalities and let people decide for themselves', he says helplessly)
Controversial Take:
There is effectively no ceiling on the value potential of Bitcoin.
If you live in a hyperinflationary environment, of which there are tons of examples in the last 100 years, the value is known. To people living with the $dollar and expecting endless monetary superiority, it is hard to recognize.
It's important to note, there is incentive for miners to use renewable energy. Vast amounts of capital have propped up renewables that languish for lack of a proper demand. Wind isn't on demand, nor is solar. But there's never any discussion of the waste and pollution that subsidized unproductive green energy solutions produce. Mining can utilize 100% of that supply. It acts as a reinforcing mechanism for investment in clean energy. How is this lost on people?
As its not taking away from another use of energy and it’s reducing pollution, and is more likely to be the majority kind of bitcoin mining
Typically this desire for any other use of energy to occur relies on not understanding why that wasnt occurring beforehand
Clean energy is obviously better, but suffers from a fundamental problem: energy is fungible.
If mining takes up 10 MWh of juice, anyone else who would have used that energy can’t. So they have to use other energy. Often fossil fuel based energy has to make up the difference. For all intents and purposes the mining used that fossil fuel energy.
If mining only used excess electricity produced by clean power plants, there would be no problem. But it’s not incentivized to use extra energy, it’s incentivized to use cheap energy. If energy can be generated by fossil fuels cheaper than what you can earn from mining, miners will use that energy. Producing pollution that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.
Even if mining only used spare energy generated from clean sources, using that energy means it can’t be stored to be used later, like at night. Possibly necessitating polluting generation later. (I know storage isn’t common today.)
If you can explain how mining either does or feasibly could given real incentives use only spare non-polluting energy I would love to know.
Bitcoin actually does a lot of good things here because it is location insensitive. For stranded energy, say methane flare gas, there is not an economical way to use the energy of this gas because transport is too expensive and demand is too far away. In this way, the bitcoin mining is consuming energy that wouldn't actually otherwise be marketable. It is also greatly reducing greenhouse emissions without demand for the energy, the methane would be burned, which has much worse emissions than when consumed in a generator.
There are likely several gigawatts of this kind of energy in north america and the amount of energy used this way and for mining in total will continue to increase without causing more pollution
This is due completely to market forces as well, which is worth saying because more mining will migrate to this without it being some altruistic response to environmental outcry
Energy==pollute, actually. Energy is fungible and most of it comes from fossil fuels.